Edward Boatman • Feb 10th
One of the primary responsibilities of any lead brand designer or creative director is to create a cohesive and consistent brand experience across all brand touch-points. Creating brand guidelines can help brand designers reach their goal of achieving brand consistency at-scale. Branding guidelines serve as a rulebook that documents key, important components of a brand. They also provide contextual information demonstrating how these components should be used most effectively.
Traditionally, brand guidelines have lived in static PDF files. While they may appear flashy in this format, the non-dynamic nature actually makes usability next to impossible. Tools like Lingo are changing the game — allowing teams to work live online, creating brand guidelines that are easy to use, update and share.
Brand guidelines:
Modern, living brand guidelines should be easy to use, share, and update. Nagarro is a great example of how an effective brand guideline can be so useful.
Digital-first branding is a branding strategy that focuses on digital assets and marketing channels. Where traditional marketing and branding strategies may be focused on billboards and other physical media, digital-first branding is all about the internet and other digital media.
With the prevalence of the internet and smartphones, a digital-first branding strategy makes more sense than ever. Billions of people have access to the internet in the palm of their hand, which means you can reach a massive audience and position your brand as a key player in your industry through digital-first branding.
Creating your brand’s guidelines is an involved process. Making brand guidelines that are effective and can stand out requires buy in from stakeholders at all levels…in design, marketing and even the C-suite.
Remember, your brand is the “face” of your business that customers see, both in the real world and in their minds. Even the most trivial parts of your brand can make or break your business. Because different pieces of your brand identity will appeal to different groups within your target audience, it’s essential to take a thoughtful approach that covers every aspect.
You can create your brand guidelines in five easy steps:
This will differ from company to company, and what’s actually needed will likely even be different from department to department. Your social media team will need different direction than your editorial team.
Some things you might want to have in your brand style guide include your logos, colors, typography, iconography and voice and tone. You should also include your mission statement or brand purpose, details about your target audience and anything else that’s relevant to your branding strategy.
Highlight your value props, differentiators and ultimately, why you’re better than the competition. Logos, taglines, colors and more all send powerful messages. Think about the message you want to send to your target audience and how you can align your branding strategy and brand assets with that message.
Your voice and tone play an important role in your messaging too.
Consistent visuals are important and should be addressed in your guide. Consider: logo, stock images and photography, icons, illustrations, typography/fonts, brand pallets, web design, interactive elements, hierarchy, etc.
In addition to documenting all guidelines, remember to include specific examples for the entire team to reference. This ensures expectations are met every time your brand is represented.
Guidelines are especially helpful when you’re onboarding new team members or outsourcing something to a third party. From social media posts to emails and advertisements, your brand needs to be consistent across every channel.
Make sure everyone has full access to all the assets and samples they need. You’ll want some form of centralized repository to house every aspect of your guide for this to work effectively. Lingo makes distributing your brand guidelines simple, safe and secure with features like SSO, roles and permissions and password-protected public links.
First and foremost, you should know your brand. To get started, create an outline of every type of content you want to document. Your brand style guide should include:
Here’s an example of a section in Lingo that documents a brand’s purpose.
From blog posts and email marketing to infographics and social media posts, your target audience affects the way your brand communicates.
Each buyer persona is defined by unique characteristics, and those characteristics determine how people respond to your mission statement and values, voice, and marketing strategies. Communicating directly to these buyer personas is an essential part of strengthening your brand and building a loyal customer base.
Create a list of buyer personas with descriptions for each persona that your teams can use to communicate through your brand. Your target audience can include everyone from ambitious entrepreneurs to travelers and philanthropists — and your branding should reflect that.
What to include:
Logos are some of the most frequently used brand assets, so it’s critical to include this section in your brand style guide.
Uploading your brand’s vector logos to Lingo is recommended because Lingo can automatically convert them to a raster format. This will help ensure everyone in your organization can easily access them, in the correct size and format, all on their own.
In addition to uploading your logos, it’s helpful to include some contextual information about how they should be used so you can ensure consistent usage.
What to include:
Like the logo represents the face of your brand, typography represents the tone and voice. If you’re putting together brand guidelines, you most likely have a font family already. If not, work with your team to find one that best represents your brands’ personality. In either case, be sure you have the right font licensing for the font family you use. And — just as important — make sure your team can access your brands’ font files.
What to include:
As many studies have shown, different colors represent different things to different people. And colors are one of your brands’ most identifying characteristics. So be sure your brands’ color palette is impactful. Most brands have a primary color palette that’s based on a single, main color.
Usually a brand will have a secondary palette to complement the primary one. If necessary, a neutral palette (grayscale) can add some contrast for your branding. Including these extra palettes is dependent on how you plan to use color in your branding. And of course, you should include the details of your brand colors into your branding guidelines.
What to include:
Believe it or not, the tone you use connotes a lot. Consider the principles you hold as a company and really think about whether or not the way you communicate demonstrates them appropriately.
It’s true that voice and tone can be a bit more difficult to implement within your branding guidelines, as they can be more vague. That said, it’s important to make sure everyone involved is in tune with the tone set forth in your guide.
What to include:
You should use the same library of icons in all publications and applications. Each icon in your asset library should be tagged and categorized so it can be easily found by other team members. Icons should be in a format like SVG where they can be both scaled and colored appropriately.
What to include:
Your brand is always changing, so keeping your brand guidelines updated is crucial if you want to be consistent. If your marketing or social media team is using outdated brand guidelines, your branding isn’t consistent across every channel.
You should update your brand guidelines when you add, remove, or change a digital asset. If your logo changes or you’re using a new color palette, you need to make sure everyone is up-to-date with those changes.
Some brands use seasonal assets for the holidays. You might use a Christmas color palette and other unique brand assets for social media posts and marketing materials. If your brand guidelines change from season to season, keeping everything updated is crucial.
With Lingo, updating your brand guidelines across all your teams is simple. You can add, remove, and edit brand guidelines at any time, and all your teams will see the updates you make. Individual teams and team members can even look at previous versions of your brand guidelines for reference.
There’s no set length you have to stick to when you’re creating brand guidelines — it all depends on how detailed you want to be. Keeping your brand guidelines precise makes them easier to skim through, but make sure you include any key logos, graphics and details about your brand. The more information you provide, the easier it will be to keep all your teams and stakeholders on the same page.
If you make a change to your logos, typography, colors or voice and tone, you should update your brand guidelines accordingly. It’s also crucial to make sure all your employees and stakeholders have access to the latest brand guidelines.
Lingo makes it easy to create custom brand guidelines using your logos and colors. Accent each page of your style guide with your logo and colors to turn your brand guidelines into an official brand document. You can even use custom domains to make your brand guidelines even easier to access.
Lingo has tons of features that make creating, sharing, and updating your brand guidelines easy. Custom branding and custom domains allow you to make brand recognition a core part of your guidelines. When you upload a file, Lingo automatically generates alternate file types so you don’t have to convert anything manually. Plus, AI-enhanced search makes searching through your guidelines quick and easy — and you don’t have to worry about manually tagging photos.
Want to see the difference powerful brand guidelines can make? LAs a female-owned small business in a fiercely competitive industry, Heat Wave Partner and Creative Director Maura Cottle describes how the company uses Lingo both internally and externally to boost brand success.
Within the company, Lingo is used to show new hires the corporate culture. It’s also used for fun stuff to boost morale. Serving as an informal photo library, anyone working there can stay up to date with internal features that serve to bolster employee welfare.
Given that the company largely deals with designing for clients who have yet to develop their own guidelines, getting it right (and consistent!) is essential. Fortunately, Lingo is designed to build on the basics, so Heat Wave can collect and get approval from clients on every aspect, every step of the way, before going further in the design process.
Font(s), logos and color palettes are all housed within the platform and access is given to as many stakeholders as possible. From the design team, to content creators, to project managers and more, a consistent, cohesive library is built and grows into a powerhouse of digital asset libraries that every member of the team has access to. Building as they obtain more info on each client, Heat Waves is bringing companies from a collection of scattered ideas to a centralized, bold brand with the power of Lingo.